Open Access Helper

Privacy Policy

Open Access Helper (Safari / Chrome Extension), Open Access Helper (iPadOS & iOS), and https://www.oahelper.org/ are a free service, available to you at no charge.

I do my very best to limit the amount of data collected to the absolute bare minimum. In this document I will outline what, how and when I do something.

I have compiled this information myself. As I am not a lawyer, let’s talk about your questions. You can reach me at Privacy Policy Questions

Information Collection and Use

Analytics

As of version 2022.9, published in September 2022, Open Access Helper uses https://telemetrydeck.com to collect some very basic usage analytics, to help inform future development directions. Open Access Helper will not sent any Privacy Relevant Information to TelemetryDeck, but the tool will further anonymise the data.

oahelper.org makes use of Matomo Analytics, but I have disabled the cookie option to avoid saving unnecessary data.

All Versions

For the app to function the following APIs are utilized (based on your preferences / settings):

This Website

For the purpose of this website, I set some basic WordPress related cookies, and I collect normal server logs (Apache).

Within the Apache Logs your IP Address has been treated, so that the last octet is removed (e.g. 101.111.112.113 will turn to 101.111.112.0).

Furthermore Apache Server logs contain information submitted by your browser, such as Operating System, Browser & Version, language preferences, date and time…

This site is hosted on a virtual private server at Linode, LLC. As of 30. January 2021 this server is located in Linode’s Frankfurt (Germany) data center.

Document Delivery Forms

A small number of libraries host a custom document delivery form at oahelper.org.

These forms request limited personally identifiable data and they are processed on oahelper.org to generate an E-Mail to the library. Oahelper.org does not store the form data submitted, but will generate an E-Mail to the library with your details, where the data will be processed.

oahelper.org is hosted at Linode LLC Frankfurt Data Center, the E-Mail service used for sending your request is maintained by 1&1 IONOS SE, Montabaur, Germany.

In order to protect your library from unwanted, machine generated submissions, the forms can (this is configurable) include Google’s ReCAPTCHA service. If this is enabled you will be shown a box “I am not a robot” and you might be challenged to further verify that you are human. Please see https://policies.google.com/privacy?hl=en-GB for further details. 

Please inquire with your library about alternative ways of submitting a request to them – I am certain they will be able to provide you with an appropriate path – and kindly disable the Ask the Library feature, should you  not wish to use this feature.

Other General Notes

Additionally the macOS app will follow every link returned by these APIs to determine, whether you might already be at the final hosting location. This happens within the extension (app) itself. However each node in the redirect, will see your IP Address. This is not done on iOS.

If you send me an E-Mail it will be forwarded to GMAIL and is kept and stored there.

Log Data

Only Apache Server Logs are created and only when you visit this website, the app itself does not communicate usage information to me.

As outlined already, the DOI is sent to unpaywall.org / core.ac.uk / openaccessbutton.org to be resolved and an Open Access version to be found.

For citation counts the DOI is sent to opencitations.net. The iOS app offers a search feature, which will send a query to core.ac.uk via API. Their Privacy Policy is found here.

Please see information about information collection and use above. A sample log entry looks like this. Kindly remember that the last 0 in the IP is the anonymized IP mentioned further above:

93.197.125.0 - - [04/Nov/2018:13:34:36 +0100] "GET /oahelper HTTP/1.1" 301 553 "-"
"Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_14) AppleWebKit/605.1.15 (KHTML, like Gecko)
Version/12.0 Safari/605.1.15"

Cookies

This site uses WordPress and WordPress typical cookies are set. For the Cookie Consent cookies are also required.

Contact

With any questions, you can reach me at:

Claus Wolf
Am Hergert 1
64853 Otzberg
Germany
info [at] oahelper.org

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